


The Mourning After

by Maggie Hall (charlottechill)



Category: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (1984)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Early Work, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Male Slash, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 00:35:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20183326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottechill/pseuds/Maggie%20Hall
Summary: As someone else said, "This is a Buckaroo Banzai story set right after the movie takes place. It's a nice little idea about Perfect Tommy and Buckaroo comforting each other over the death of Rawhide with a little surprise at the end."





	The Mourning After

**Author's Note:**

> Originally appeared in Concupiscence 4, 1995. (Slightly edited for typos and too many words.)

It was late afternoon when Buckaroo Banzai found the time, and the strength, to grieve. The day had been a little hectic, what with saving the world, having tested the oscillator, and finding that there were advanced civilizations sharing his space in other dimensions.

Rawhide was dead.

He showered, shaved and dried himself, and stood for long minutes staring at his wardrobe. Team Banzai would provide a funeral service, probably as early as tomorrow afternoon. A closed casket without Rawhide in it would be presented to the public. I just hate the idea of everybody starin’ at me when I can’t stare back at ’em. The casket would be returned to the mortuary and reunited with Rawhide’s body, and cremated. Just burn it and get rid of it, Buckaroo. I got no ties to any one place, so I don’t care where you put the ashes. But don’t stick ’em in some fancy urn, please God not that. Throw ’em out. He hadn’t decided where to put them yet; naked, he walked to his window and examined the gardens. The willow trees might benefit from human ashes. He’d have to ask Cecelia.

He walked back to the wardrobe, reached and ran his fingers over the silk of the white kimono he would wear when he cared for Rawhide’s remains. Then he opened the bureau drawer and pulled out a pair of worn, faded Levi’s, an equally worn white “Columbia University” sweatshirt, running socks and tennis shoes. Now certainly wasn’t a time for formality.

On his way out of his rooms he passed Penny, who stopped him in the hall. She looked distinctly uncomfortable, as did anyone who believed they should be feeling things they weren’t. “I heard about Rawhide,” she said, and bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” he said, stepping past her; she seemed about to say more, frowned, and turned away. 

Buckaroo continued uninterrupted to the kitchens. Mrs. Johnston and one of the Regulars were at the counter. She looked up without comment, and returned immediately to her newspaper. Buckaroo went to the stove. Warmer on, water in pot, he tossed green tea leaves in and allowed them to steep for a few minutes. He set a black lacquered tray with two cups, grabbed the pot and left the room without a word. It was gratifying, living with people who respected personal boundaries.

Rawhide’s rooms were unlocked. Balancing the tray between his hand and the wall, he twisted the knob and pushed the door open, holding it with his hip and backing into the sitting room. He turned toward the red tiled patio that took up the entire corner of the building, and paused. The sliding door was ajar, and Perfect Tommy was sitting outside with his back pressed against the glass. Tommy was dressed in black, which was rare for him: black boots, black pants, black jacket. Buckaroo could just make out the black and silver pattern of the scarf where it overflowed the jacket’s collar. One leg stretched straight before him, Tommy balanced his forearm on a bent knee. His other hand was curled loosely around a bottle of Rawhide’s beer.

Buckaroo hesitated in the doorway, remembering his thought only seconds ago about respecting personal boundaries—but this was Rawhide’s stomping ground, and it made more sense at the moment to stay. He stepped over the threshold and elbowed the door closed. He eased his hip against the knob, depressing the locking mechanism with a practiced move that didn’t unbalance the tea tray.

He padded silently to the frame of the open patio door.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Buckaroo,” Tommy said laconically. He still hadn’t moved; his eyes were focused on some distant point in the trees.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, either, Tommy. Am I intruding?”

Tommy looked up at him for the first time, and a ghost of a smile haunted his face. “No.” He gestured with the beer bottle, and turned his face away. “Pull up a piece of patio.”

Buckaroo moved to the left of the open door and settled the tray on the low table by the potted palm. He dropped, Indian-style in deference to his confining tennis shoes, and filled two cups. One would remain untouched on the tray; the other he took in his cupped palms, inhaling gently of the steam. Tommy silently raised the bottle to his lips and sipped at the beer.

There was nothing to say, and no reason to say it. They shared the silence through four cups of tea and two thirds of the beer.

He spent a moment remembering why Rawhide was dead, accepting the responsibility for being the person Rawhide had chosen to protect. He wouldn’t have done the same for Rawhide; Rawhide would never have forgiven him if he had—and it wasn’t his job, his friend would have said. Nothing would change what had happened. Certainly guilt wouldn’t make Rawhide happy.

Buckaroo spent the hour in quiet contemplation, clearing his mind of extraneous details, isolating the beliefs, attitudes, strengths and weaknesses that had made Rawhide the man he was. To distill Rawhide apart from the world was to isolate him, to enclose him in a sterile environment with only one way in or out. No one would visit that place but Buckaroo. No one would ever have an opportunity to learn what Buckaroo had learned about Rawhide. It was a lonely process, to embrace death, and one not quickly completed. There was so much in the Institute that had Rawhide’s mark, and it would be weeks at least before he would walk the halls without noting them, and his partner’s absence. The process of remembrance reached a stopping place, and Buckaroo focused his attention on the gardens, staring at the same blank serenity that had seemed to hold Perfect Tommy’s attention all this time.

The breeze against his skin was pleasantly mild. Birds chirruped and sang, trees and shrubs rustled while the cool blues and greens of nature abounded in the garden and the sky.

He took a deep breath, holding it until the sun was just inches off the curve of the planet, letting it out with a request. “Spend the night with me tonight.”

At that moment they were very much in synch, he and Tommy. He sat quietly, feeling the air cool with the approaching evening, thinking of nothing, waiting for nothing, while Tommy sat beside him and sipped at Rawhide’s beer. The grass continued to grow, the lines between light and shadow continued to fade, and the horizon obscured half the disk of the sun before Tommy uttered his first words since offering him a seat. He pursed his lips and said, “Tonight would be fine, Buckaroo,” and tipped up the bottle for the dregs.

Buckaroo reached for the tea tray, stood in one quick movement, and wandered back inside Rawhide’s rooms. In the anteroom’s bare center, he paused and slowly turned a full circle to take everything in. It was ceremonially spotless, and almost bare; two tatami mats were folded in a corner behind the hall door, and three hand-painted, antique Japanese fans were folded across the corner joists at the ceiling. The heavily padded carpet had been chalked so many times for martial arts practices that it was ruined for anything else. Buckaroo realized abruptly that he didn’t want the rooms inhabited by anyone else, and wondered why.

The only other color in this room came from the picture window and the closed, leaf-green sliding door into the bedroom. Perfect Tommy tapped his elbow and took the tea tray. “Go on in, Buckaroo. I’ll just put this stuff down.”

The bedroom was waiting for Rawhide’s return. Windowless, small, this room backed against the twisting hallway, giving “a real Alamo kind of feel to it,” Rawhide had said; it was very defensible, and there was nowhere left to run. Now that he thought of it away from its owner, this place seemed odd. Slate-grey walls smoothly absorbed light, making the place feel always-dim, almost womb-like. Rawhide had never offered adequate explanation to the question “why,” and Buckaroo hadn’t pried.

The few furnishings were Japanese or Antebellum Confederate, ranging from the black lacquered kotatsu table to an antique chest of drawers. And the furniture coverings were uniformly white. All except the moss colored bedcover, still rumpled. The only things that disturbed the room’s uniform serenity were the things that said someone lived there. Guns were racked haphazardly in the open closet. Cowboy boots worn in with months of work, the clothes that were scattered beside a never used laundry bag, the personal items strewn over the top of the chest of drawers—this place could have been a hotel room. The refrigerator hummed in a corner, and only then did Buckaroo remember that Perfect Tommy had been in here too, to retrieve the beer.

“You okay, Buckaroo?”

Tommy’s voice from the door, atypically reticent. “You don’t have to do this, Tommy,” Buckaroo said without turning.

“No kidding.”

The words held none of their usual sarcasm. Buckaroo closed his eyes and laced his fingers behind his head, hesitant about this unusual wake. Fingers touched his, loosening them. Dropped to his shoulders and dug gently into the tense muscles. Tommy’s words were barely a whisper: “Sorry. I probably need this more than you do.”

“We don’t need it, Tommy.”

“Maybe you’re right. Doesn’t stop you from wanting it, though. Right here?”

He sighed, accepting that truth was stranger than fiction, and that against most of his better judgment he was going to have sex with Perfect Tommy now. The hands on his shoulders guided him to turn, and the brown eyes stared at him with such sobriety that it would have been difficult not to respond to the open entreaty in them. He leaned forward and pressed his mouth against Tommy’s, searching for a reflexive flinch that never came. Tommy kissed back: unaggressive but firm, taking control without asking. A hand touched the back of his head; a tongue parted his lips, and nudged open his teeth. Easy arrogant certainty, that was more often Tommy than anything else was. Somehow, it surprised him. Tommy pulled away a little, his breath warm and damp on Buckaroo’s wet lips.

Tommy tilted his head toward the bed, frowning a little. “Here, right?”

He nodded, watched as Tommy backed away and slid out of his jacket. The untied scarf fluttered to the floor, revealing Tommy to the waist all pale skin and thin, fine muscle. Without making eye contact, apparently without any concern at all, Tommy heeled off his boots, unbuckled his pants and slid everything to the floor. Tommy folded the comforter to the end of the futon and stretched out on his side.

Buckaroo licked his lips, silently looking into that walled-off place that was Rawhide in his mind. This might be ridiculous, he told himself. You’re too hard on yourself, Rawhide’s voice supplied. The people are all out there: the team, the Blazers, half the rest of the damned world, and you just don’t look at it from the right point of view.

Rawhide had been right. The whole universe was out there beyond his skin, and the only thing that determined which part of it he saw, was which part of it he looked at. He looked at Perfect Tommy, while his own hand stilled loosely held the hem of his sweatshirt. Tommy’s body was lithe and lean, almost too slender. His skin was pearl-white, the three pale scars artistic splashes of color against a pristine canvas. Ivory hair offered only the mildest contrast against the pearl skin: Ivory, the pale copper of lips and nipples, darker blush of semi-erect penis and the deep woody brown of Tommy’s eyes.

Enough thinking. Too much comparison. Far more indecision than he normally experienced in a month of Sundays. He tugged off his sweatshirt, watching Tommy impassively watching him. He stripped off everything else without thinking about it, aroused because sex, and Rawhide, and this bed with Tommy lying stretched taut and silent, were all he was thinking about.

Sliding against Tommy’s naked body was a surprise, the skin as soft as hot silk. Slender arms wrapped around him, warm lips opened his, and Buckaroo surrendered his thoughts to the easy embrace that his teammate offered. Tommy’s body was so different from Rawhide’s it was like gender, or night and day. Slender and light where Rawhide was broader and heavy, skin smooth like powder where Rawhide’s was hairier, coarser, Tommy was nonetheless exactly what his grief seemed to need. And Tommy seemed content to take the lead, coolly guiding the foreplay. It was somehow inappropriate to respond so strongly to measured touches, to the brow-furrowed care Tommy paid to the details of tenderness.

Astonished, confused by his body’s volatile sensitivity, Buckaroo rolled prone at the gentle request of fingertips. Tommy knew what he was doing, and apparently he knew what was wanted. Buckaroo found himself in neither the position nor the mood to argue, and in moments he was breathing deeply and evenly, relaxing into the pain of being penetrated. He spread his knees slightly to help as he could.

“You okay?” Tommy asked, pausing.

Buckaroo nodded against the pillow. “Hold my hands.”

“What?”

“My hands,” he repeated, unwilling to explain why. “Hold them. Just lace your fingers through mine and hold my hands while you do this.” Tommy hesitated, then rebalanced his weight and ran his hands up Buckaroo’s forearms. He was obviously uncertain, matching their hands in mirror reflection, palm to palm, pausing again when Buckaroo shook his hands free. “Not like that. Just lay your hands on top of mine, your palms to the backs of mine,” he said quietly. Tommy did as he was told, and Buckaroo felt a settling inside him when Tommy squeezed hard. “All right. Go ahead.” He wondered that Rawhide had never done this to Tommy; wondered if Rawhide had ever even penetrated him, or if being sodomized wasn’t Tommy’s penchant.

Tommy pressed the last few inches home, his pubic hair soft like lambs’ wool against Buckaroo’s buttocks. The quick settling abruptly ended his idle speculation. Tommy’s head rested against his shoulder, breath stirring the hair across his neck. “How do you want it, Buckaroo?” he whispered.

If Buckaroo tried, he could imagine that whispered southern accent was Rawhide’s. “Slowly,” he whispered back. “Long strokes. Care about it, Tommy.”

He felt a kiss pressed against the nape of his neck, heard a catch in Tommy’s voice as his hands were squeezed almost painfully tight. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, stop that.”

They lay there pressed tightly together, the heat of their bodies generating a fine film of perspiration, the sound of his breathing amplified between his ear and the pillow, and Tommy started to move just as he’d been asked. It was slow, and gentle, filling and emptying him with every thrust, so easy to respond to. As the rhythm between them settled, Tommy’s fingers began to clutch at his hands in time with the lovemaking, just like Rawhide’s always had. The friction inside him was intense, dragging down his attention and driving the grief away. Tommy’s hands kept clutching at his own, Tommy’s sex was driving his body to familiar, distracting heights; Rawhide’s smell was still strong in the linen.

“Harder,” he whispered, grinding his teeth together, pushing his erection against the mattress.

“No.” Tommy kept the gentle pace, panting against his neck, ignoring his urgent counter-thrusts. Inexorably wearing him down, placing him in an emotional and sexual position in which he hadn’t wanted to be. Rawhide, you taught him too well…. 

When the tears came, Tommy whispered, “That’s good,” and again it could have been Rawhide’s voice. A sob escaped him, and above him Tommy sighed. The pillow case was damp beneath his cheek, his erection was painfully full, his body was teetering on an emotional edge that would bury him in climax any second now, and still Tommy practiced patient, measured thrusts.

Maybe he was perfect.

Orgasm blinded Buckaroo. He heard his own voice, wordlessly crying out, felt the pent-up grief lancing through his nerves, the carrier wave of pleasure transporting it up, out of him in a timeless, wailing moment—

—and still, Tommy practiced perfect, measured thrusts. Buckaroo was gasping, his skin too tender against the sheets, his insides too sensitized to accept even those gentle thrusts. “Stop….”

Tommy froze, buried in him, and he felt the damp, heavy breaths chill the sweat at his neck, wondered mindlessly where Tommy had learned such control. “You say when, Buckaroo,” Tommy said, but his voice cracked.

Buckaroo tightened his muscles, bearing down on Tommy’s erection in contrite apology. “Just a minute.”

Tommy’s open mouth traveled along his shoulder. A tongue licked long cool swathes against his skin, while his body slowly returned to some semblance of calm. 

“Okay,” he breathed, relaxing against the bed. “Any way you want it.”

Tommy’s hands pulled free of his, stroked over his heaving ribs and down to his hips. They stole over his buttocks and against his inner thighs, as Tommy shifted his weight to accommodate the caress. “Let’s get up a little,” Tommy panted. “Just a little.

Buckaroo dragged himself back a little, not quite to his knees in response to Tommy’s gentle prodding. He planted his weight on his elbows and lowered his head, his body saturated with pleasure. Lassitude pervaded him, made his muscles lax, and he felt barely able to support their combined weight. Tommy’s hands moved back up to his own again, fingers lacing through his, and he gasped with the first aggressive thrust. Again, Tommy paused. “Is it too much?”

Buckaroo shook his head, and squeezed Tommy’s fingers with his own. “No. It’s good.” It wouldn’t have mattered if it weren’t, his own pleasure incidental to him now. Tommy’s hair tickled his shoulder blades when he nodded and began to thrust. The rhythm was hard and fast, and he struggled to match it. It wouldn’t have mattered, he could probably have lain passively while Tommy fulfilled his own needs. But he didn’t want to, and the fervent urgency was a pleasure. Tommy was a pleasure.

Very soon the thrusts became erratic and he fought to lift his hips, to hold still— Tommy’s lips opened and sealed against Buckaroo’s spine at the base of his skull. Tommy’s body quaked; he groaned, screamed as his orgasm shook him. The sound transmitted through skin and bone, ringing in Buckaroo’s body like a bell. Buckaroo settled himself and turned his head to offer solace, but Tommy turned his face away. He was still crying out on a long, thin expulsion of air. Tommy didn’t want to be seen while he grieved; Buckaroo would remember that, as the evening wore on. He turned his face back to the pillow and tightened his buttocks, flexed his fingers against Tommy’s, and waited.

It proved a long moment, and he was sure that Tommy didn’t cry. The breaths against his neck were long, slow and measured; no moisture touched his skin. As Tommy’s breathing shallowed, he asked, “Everything all right?”

“Just fine, Buckaroo.” His voice was quiet, and completely normal.

Buckaroo wondered for an instant how much that calm might be costing, and how much Tommy may have needed more time alone. “Tommy, you don’t need to stay here if you don’t want to.” Privacy for someone like Perfect Tommy was paramount.

“You’ve got nowhere to go.”

“I can go anywhere, Tommy. Everyone in this building knows what happened, and how important Rawhide was to me.”

Surprisingly, Tommy’s body stiffened slightly against him. “I guess there’s plenty of people willing to keep you warm, huh.”

“Now you stop that, Tommy,” he snapped, short-tempered for the first time all day. “It wasn’t my intention to just move from one of you to another. This wasn’t the point at all.”

“Well hell, Buckaroo, that’s pretty obvious. Besides, if you gotta know, I’m about the straightest person in this bunch.”

Buckaroo started, his irritation blown away. “Then what was it we just did?”

Tommy shrugged, looked almost guilty. “I think we were trying to forget that Rawhide’s dead,” he said bluntly.

“Were you lovers?”

Tommy turned back toward him, a half-smile shadowing over his face. “Were you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Buckaroo laughed, arrested somehow by the image of Rawhide, better than any of them at keeping the peace, better at letting everyone feel however they needed to feel without once letting it get in the way of whatever work he wanted done. Rawhide kept the show on the road, and held his peace. Buckaroo didn’t know who would do it, now.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“No.” 

Buckaroo supposed there wasn’t much to tell, from Perfect Tommy’s point of view. Tommy was too pragmatic to be so sentimental. Which was why being in bed with him now was so very strange. “But I will.” That surprised him, and Tommy didn’t usually do that. “I guess it was pretty obvious to him, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when I came on board here.” 

Buckaroo rolled onto his side to watch the story unfold. Tommy’s skin was so pale everywhere, and soft like powder to the touch. His body was relaxed, hands clasped and tucked back under his head while he stared at the ceiling and related a tale Buckaroo had never thought he would tell. 

“If I’d just kept my mouth shut and my brain open, he’d have left me to learning the ropes on my own.” Tommy shrugged, unconsciously drawing Buckaroo’s eye down, to the curve of pectoral and rib just under the upraised arm. Tommy’s hair was blond everywhere, and like velvet it invited the testing touch of fingers. “But,” he laughed a little, “being open-minded has never been my strong suit.

“So Rawhide kept me from doin’ any real damage around here, and he made me listen. Gave me whatever I needed to take my lumps without feelin’ dumb about ’em. And—well, I’m not blind, Buckaroo. I could tell Rawhide was the number one gun around here, and that he was important to almost everybody. He made it clear he wouldn’t say no, so I thought, probably the smart thing to do.”

Buckaroo could picture that easily enough, even why Rawhide would do it. Being Perfect all the time was a dirty job, and Tommy was the only one who was willing to do it. But Tommy’s pride made for blind spots along the way, blind spots that Rawhide would’ve seen as liabilities. Tommy would have seen an advance from Rawhide as a display of trust, and Tommy had needed that more than anything else, those first weeks.

“He let me out of it as easily as he’d let me into it. One day we were sitting out on the back lawn, he looked at me and smiled, and said, ‘You bored with me yet, Tommy?’ I told him I wasn’t, not really, but he just smiled again, and said—and I’ll never forget this, Buckaroo, because I knew he meant it, like, all the tough stuff about him was just gone, and he was talking to me like I always thought a father should. He said, ‘I’m glad I could help you be perfect, Tommy. I’m glad you’re on our team, and anytime you need anything, you know where to find me.’ Just like that.” 

He wondered if Tommy had understood Rawhide. “You thought sleeping with him would make your life easier?”

“I don’t know what I thought—and if you ever repeat that, I’ll deny it.”

It was a day for revelations, and Buckaroo wondered who would become Tommy’s new confidant… and his own. Tommy turned his head and smiled, then rolled up against him, dusting Buckaroo’s body with the fine, smooth feel of warm skin. “You think too much, Buckaroo. Rawhide used to say that.”

It was true.

He opened his mouth to say as much, but Tommy stifled the words, mouth covering his, tongue slipping in uninvited, but welcome just the same. After that tale, Tommy’s urgency was fervent and solid and completely understandable. If they had started out just to have sex, they’d left that goal by the wayside; and making love with Tommy, made poignant by its rarity, was a gift to them both.

Some time later, his body enervated and sated and relaxed, Buckaroo stared at the ceiling and asked the question he’d checked all this time. “Why did you call yourself straight?” he asked, expecting a characteristic Tommy response like, “because queer isn’t perfect.” Tommy’s world-view was often narrow, but always expandable. Into the silence, he wondered why he’d asked the question; it was Tommy’s business, and certainly not his own.

“Because I think I am. I love women, Buckaroo. I love everything about ’em, but I have a problem. I don’t trust women I don’t know, and I don’t know any women well enough to trust. Not with something like this, not with watching Rawhide die.” Tommy rested his cheek on his folded arms and closed his eyes, but the tension in him was obvious. “Not very perfect, is it?” he asked, voice tight.

Buckaroo felt a pain in his middle like a solid blow, like hot, torn muscle straining against its own weight. Tommy would keep growing up like this, he’d keep maturing, understanding more about himself and being willing to share it because he lived in an environment that gave him room to be everyone’s kid brother without locking him in. Tommy was going to grow up, and Rawhide would never be able to see it.

He wished he believed in a god, or in something more than universal patterns, because he knew how much pleasure Rawhide would have taken in watching this.

When he had control of his voice, he whispered, “Tommy, it’s more perfect than you know.” I’ll watch him for you, Rawhide, and I’ll try to enjoy it as you would have.

“Yeah?” Tommy opened his eyes, searching for honesty and finding it. “Uh… yeah.”

“My bed’s open to you, Tommy, whenever you want it. You know that, don’t you?”

Tommy nodded. “Yeah, thanks. I’m sorry I can’t say the same.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. And I’m glad you were here, tonight. It was… perfect.”

Tommy shrugged and rolled onto his back, bringing his forearm up across his eyes. “Yeah.” The silence settled comfortably over them for a moment before Tommy said, “I ought to get back to my own place.”

The voice that replied from the anteroom made every muscle in Buckaroo’s body stiffen with surprise. “Does that mean you two’re finally done in there, then?”

Like splintering glass, the walls to that isolated memory of Rawhide shattered and fell. He felt his heart pounding again, beating heavily against the wall of his ribs. 

Tommy sat bolt upright in the bed. “Rawhide? What’re you doing here, man? You’re dead!”

“Apparently not,” Buckaroo said, turning his head. Rawhide was leaning on the doorframe looking maternal, arms crossed over his chest. And very much alive. He was still wearing the same clothes he’d died in. Buckaroo just dropped his head to the pillow and covered his eyes with a forearm while Tommy babbled on.

“But I saw you punch your ticket, Rawhide. John Parker said there was no antidote.”

“Tell that to the guys in the spaceship. What in Hades were you two doin’ in here?”

Buckaroo didn’t even need to look to see Tommy’s sudden flush. He reached out a hand and patted a pale thigh, uncovering his eyes and looking straight at his right hand. “We were mourning your passing, my friend.”

“Uh huh. Little early, wasn’t it?”

Tommy smacked the wall in disgust. “I saw Jersey’s report. It matched Aikida’s. You were dead. But don’t worry, next time I’ll wait till we dispose of the body.”

“Might be a good idea.” Rawhide took two steps into the room, still smiling. “Now go on, Tommy, git. We’ll talk later.”

Tommy rolled out of bed and grabbed his trousers, shaking them out and jumping into them with both feet simultaneously. Angrily, making a disgusted sound, he grabbed up his jacket. He frowned at Rawhide while he slipped his arms into the sleeves. “I had sex with Buckaroo for nothing. If I wasn’t perfect, Rawhide, I just might be mad at you now.”

“But you are Perfect, Tommy,” Rawhide said with gentle humor, reaching out and grasping Tommy’s arm. “You did the right thing.”

Tommy stared at the hand on his arm, visibly calming until Rawhide let him go. Tommy slowly resumed dressing, finished looping his belt through his pants, and cinched it tight. He picked up his scarf and threaded it absently through his fingers before looking up and offering the old, familiar smile. Buckaroo saw it only in profile; it was aimed at Rawhide. “Good to have you back, partner. But next time—if there is one—try rising from the dead a few hours earlier, and saving everybody trouble.”

Rawhide chuckled. “I’ll do my best. Lock up when you leave.”

Tommy glanced over at Buckaroo, all his old calm arrogance smoothly masking whatever relief he was feeling. “Right. See you later.”

Buckaroo nodded, and waited until he heard the door snick shut before speaking again. His voice sounded frail and under-used. “Tommy was right. We thought you were dead.”

Rawhide sidled up to the futon and sat down on its edge. A hand branded the cooling skin of Buckaroo’s bare hip. “Yeah, partner. Sorry about that. You know that disruptin’ the schedule around here is the last thing I’d want to do.”

Buckaroo reached for the hand at his hip and grabbed it with his entire strength. “Save the jokes and let me get my breath back.”

They shared a long, long silence, not even looking at each other. The single anchor of their clasped hands was more than enough.

Eventually, Buckaroo nodded his head to take in the room and the last few hours. “Tommy’s going to be a little prickly over this.”

Rawhide glanced toward the door and his mouth softened into a smile. “Nah, he’ll be fine. It’ll give him some character, realizin’ he’s willin’ to go out of his way for the team. Help him grow up.”

“It didn’t do me any harm to realize that, either.” He let the silence stretch, freeing the pent-up memories of his partner, hoping he wouldn’t need to go through this again any time soon. “You won’t duck out on him again before he’s finished growing up, will you?”

The hand, amazingly, squeezed even harder at his own. “I’ll do my best not to duck out again, period, Buckaroo. But I have to say, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.”

“And I can’t convince you to just yell ‘duck’, can I?”

“Nope.”

Finally, Buckaroo sat up and grabbed his friend in a bruising embrace. The pain of mourning had cleared the way for the pleasure of welcome, in its own paradoxical way making this feeling all the more sweet. “You’ll have to tell me what death is like,” he whispered against Rawhide’s cotton shirt.

“I think you’ll be very surprised, Buckaroo. Don’t clutter your head with speculation; I’ll write a paper on it sometime soon.”

“I’ll read it.” Rawhide’s arms were relaxing their grip; he pulled himself together and drew away. “Well, I suppose there are people to tell. I should inform the press, certainly. Oh, damn—I haven’t returned the president’s call yet, or gone over the stock re-order requisitions. What was I thinking?”

A callused hand rested gently, suggestively, on his thigh, refusing to let him distract himself from the day. “I’d hazard a couple of guesses, but who am I to state the obvious?”

“You were dead,” he said again, stating it for them. “I didn’t ever want to watch you die. But that’s really all there is to say about that.”

“I was dead, so you and Tommy….” Rawhide trailed off, and Buckaroo smiled at the invitation for idle talk. Or depressurization. He wasn’t sure which.

“Yes. Like I said, Tommy was very supportive. You’ll have to tell me about your novel approach to him, some day.”

But Rawhide just offered up a secret little grin. “No, I won’t. Whatever Tommy tells you is your business; when you’ve gotta come fishin’ in this pond,” he said, tapping his own forehead, “that’s when I know you’re thinking too much. That, or it’s plain old prurience.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve gotta say, though, I was a little surprised to hear you both in here when I came in.”

Buckaroo smiled, a quick flinch of muscles that had atrophied in the hours between Rawhide’s death and now. All those things he had promised his friend’s corpse, tasks to perform in Rawhide’s stead—maybe he should do them anyway, alongside his friend. “That’s only fair, partner; we were a little surprised to hear you, too.” It was amazing, the symmetry that could so often lend itself to life…. Tommy was growing up. Buckaroo had learned some important things about himself and his people. Rawhide was alive and well—Team Banzai wound up suffering no losses at all, in fact, instead of the two that would have meant so much, for such different reasons— 

He was really looking forward to that paper on life and death and life.

Rawhide continued, “Well, I’m real proud of Tommy. I read the reports on his work today.” The hand on his thigh relaxed, curving loosely against his skin. Knuckles rubbed like a cat’s chin against him. “Yeah, I’m real proud of him.”

Buckaroo glanced up, taking everything, the spoken and the silent, in. Almost-paternal pride, not even slightly out of place. “You should be, Rawhide. We all should be.”

The kiss was a surprise, succulent and rich with the soft scratch of beard, and oh, such emotion. 

Love. Pleasure. Relief? Certainly from Buckaroo’s side. The tension had flooded out of him, and kept backwashing even now. Too much, relief, maybe; the amount of work he needed to do just to get through the day was piling into his brain even as the blood rushed out of it. Overcompensating for his feelings through work was something he thought he’d given up long ago. 

Rawhide must have read his mind. “We’ve got a gig tonight, don’t we? Unless somebody jumped the gun and canceled it. Then there’s the end-of-the month stuff; supply orders, inventory reviews. I can get that out of the way before the family dinner. You want me to take care of makin’ a press release about myself, before we get to the gig? No sense givin’ anybody a heart attack, not when we’d have to stop the show to treat ’em. Besides, I’ve always wanted to say, ‘The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’” He pretended to think about it. “Might look good in the papers, too.”

Buckaroo was breathing hard, balanced on a knife-edge between laughing and crawling right back into this musty, crumpled bed with his lover. “Maybe I should say hello in a more fitting way,” he said, teetering.

Rawhide chuckled and stepped away, reaching for Buckaroo’s abandoned jeans and holding them out in offering. “If you’re implying sex,” he said, laughing, “please don’t try it. If you couldn’t manage it, you’d be disappointed. And if you could, Tommy’d be offended. Maybe you should get back to work, now that you’ve had a minute to think about it.” Rawhide swiped at his mouth, obviously enjoying his own humor. “After all, you already gave my hello to him.”


End file.
